Tag Archives: Sharepoint

About 3 weeks before the upgrade took place, I received e-mails informing me about the upcoming update. It included the plan date and also mentioned I could postpone the update. As the date of the upgrade approached I also received mails with information of new features and what had to be done.

The upgrade itself took place on the date that was communicated to me and when it was done I got a mail informing me that the upgrade had been completed. When I logged on to the Office 365 admin center (https://portal.microsoftonline.com/) I immediately found this to be a big improvement. It also showed me some alerts containing links to information about changes and tasks that still needed to be performed like upgrading SharePoint sites.

I didn’t expect any big issues, but I was a bit worried if my SharePoint customizations would keep working correctly:

It is possible to leave the SharePoint site the way it is (at least with this upgrade), but you can also upgrade it and take advantage of the new options. If you are considering upgrading the SharePoint site, you can perform a health check and you can also request an upgrade evaluation copy of the site collection before you actually upgrade.

Probably because of my customizations, the Site Collection Health Check found some problems related to Customized Files that could result in unexpected visuals or behavior.

For now, everything seems to be working fine though on my upgrade evaluation copy of the site collection, so I’ll probably upgrade my site collection soon. If you want to, you can take a look at both the pre-upgrade SharePoint site and the post-upgrade SharePoint site. The evaluation post-upgrade version will only be available until the 23rd of June.

What I did notice, is that the interface of the services have improved and have also been changed to better suit for touch devices. By example the white space between navigation items seems to have increased and everything is a bit bigger.

After the upgrade, I also had to restart some Office 2013 apps once.

Of course the upgrade to Wave 15 provides many more advantages, but in this post I only wanted to share my service upgrade experience without really changing anything. All in all, I think the upgrade experience went very well.

In yesterday’s blog post I mentioned that I was looking forward to being upgraded to the new Office 365 in the next 4 weeks.

I did encounter an issue however that I was not able to open files on SharePoint using the desktop version of Office 2013. I kept on getting the message: “call us overprotective, but we need to verify your account before opening this document”. This never succeeded and I couldn’t modify my file using Office 2013. The Office Web App version was working fine though.

These changes are in effect right now. In short this means that the E1 and K1 plans that previously were only able to read with the Web Apps have gotten the full Office Web Apps (view, edit, create). This replaces the old E2 and K2. So basically:

Old E1/K1 have gotten E2/K2 functionality at the same low cost.

Old E2/K2 customers will keep the same features, but at a lower cost (E1/K1).

Old E2/K2 will be replaced by E1/K1 since they will then have the same functionality.

The new situation has become like this:

New Office 365 Enterprise Plans overview

PS: I love the Office 365 service and I’m looking forward to the new Office 365 features that will be added when Office 365 will start using the Office 2013 (Wave 15) versions of SharePoint, Outlook, Lync, Office Web Apps. I’ve gotten a mail that I’m planned to be upgraded within the next 4 weeks, so more about that soon. I’m especially curious if my SharePoint customizations will continue to work.

Nowadays more and more work, communication and collaboration involves multiple external parties. This can involve by example employees, customers, partners, suppliers, cloud providers/platforms/applications.

This means it is becoming increasingly important to have proper authentication and authorization methods in place for single sign on (SSO) so users can be more productive. Besides the ease-of-use It can also lead to better security.

Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) will make this possible. For more information on ADFS, here are some resources. Keep in mind though that while some information may be outdated, it will give you a broad idea of the concept and the inner workings. The current version of ADFS in Windows Server 2012 is 2.1 , while Windows Server 2008 uses 2.0

PS: Microsoft is moving more and more towards claims based authentication. Examples include Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control and also SharePoint 2013 that has switched to claims based authentication by default now.

If you have some other resources that might be useful, please let me know so I can add them as well.

In the past I’ve created a post to get my public site to become a SharePoint 2010 style team site. The only thing I’d been missing since was a way to allow public/anonymous users to use the search (when trying to perform a search you would have to logon).This also meant that filters in the lists I created weren’t working 😦

Because of the unsupported customizing I did on the SharePoint site, I thought this just wasn’t possible.

Current E2/K2 customers will keep the same features, but at a lower cost (E1/K1).

E2/K2 will be replaced by E1/K1 since they will then have the same functionality.

The new situation will become like this:

New Office 365 Enterprise Plans overview

PS: Besides the lower prices I’m also looking forward to the new Office 365 features that will be added when Office 365 will start using the Office 2013 (Wave 15) versions of SharePoint, Outlook, Lync, Office Web Apps. More about that soon.